Rosalind stopped, and went to the kitchen to make some tea. I sat in a rather sombre mood by the fire, still puzzled by her reference to my thesis. She was quite right, of course. There had been a considerable weakening in the economic position of the aristocracy in Victorian times. They had compensated by marrying their children into the new wealth of industry and finance. Partly as a result, social conventions became much less exacting. Peers and their sons were permanent fixtures at theatre doors, and they were marrying singers and actresses by the score. What happened between de Walden and Florence at the Grand Theatre, I mused, was not an extraordinary event, but an insignificant moment in a process of wider social change.
I heard the sound of someone sobbing in one of the bedrooms upstairs. It sounded like the crying of a young child in a hospital ward late at night. Not the tears of pain or neglect, but loneliness.
Rosalind came back into the room carrying a tray with tea and some food. “Imitation sausage rolls,” she said, putting the tray on the table between us. “Dylan came unexpectedly one day, and I had nothing to give him. So I invented these. Not real sausage because you couldn’t get that in the war. Just cold haricot beans, put through the mincer with a bit of cold meat, a rasher of bacon, lots of pepper and sage, some herbs, and then well pounded.”
I thought of Mr Beynon and Mr Pugh.
Rosalind passed the plate across. “I hope you like them, Martin.”
I looked at the plate. There were two rows of thin sausages, not sausage rolls at all, because they had no pastry. “You made them the right size for me.”
“Go ahead, you must be hungry.”
“No, please, after you. I’ll have some tea first.”
She took a sausage from the row nearest to her, and put the plate back on the table so that the full row was closest to me. “Now, where were we?”
“How did you find out about my thesis?” I had meant to ask why had she gone to so much trouble but she understood what I was really after.
“You think I’d have these talks with you without first doing my homework?”
“But it’s from such a long time ago.”
“It’s all on the Net.” She let the pause tease me. “Don’t look so surprised. This old lady knows how to surf.”
I heard the creak of a bed. I wondered if it would be polite to ask who was upstairs.
“You still haven’t had a sausage.”
“In a minute.”
“There’s some sorrel in them and one or two things from Fern Hill.” She took another sausage from her side of the plate. She fixed her gaze on me, willing me, or so I felt, to take one. “All that trouble I took to make them.”
I could hear crying again from upstairs. Either Rosalind heard nothing or she was determined to ignore it and pretend everything was normal. She stood up, and went to the kitchen to re-fill the tea-pot. I snatched up a sausage from my side of the plate, and put it in my jacket pocket. She came back into the room with the fresh tea. “That was lovely,” I said, smacking my lips, “best sausage I’ve had since O’Malley’s.”
“Let’s get back to Under Milk Wood.”
This is Milk Wood, I thought.
“You see, it hasn’t got much of a plot, it depends totally on character revelation, and Dylan didn’t see the characters until he’d seen the identical ambiguities of his own and Waldo’s conception. And that’s precisely where the play comes unstuck. It’s hopelessly unbalanced...”
“Too much sex...”
“No, that’s what they all get wrong. Dylan was obsessed with paternity.”
I heard the bed creak again, followed by the sound of someone shuffling across the floor.
“You may not have realised...” pausing as if telling me to brace myself for some startling information, “...but Milk Wood contains six menage à trois, numerous fatherless babies, three loose women and even more looser men, all neatly tied symbolically together in Mr Waldo’s many paternity summonses.”
“And Dylan saw himself as both Mr Waldo senior and little Waldo his son?”
“Yes, the bastard who begot another.”
“And Lord Cut-Glass, whose letter made the genius flower?”
“The time lord, tending his sixty-six clocks, one for each year of de Walden’s life. The clues are there if you want to find them.”
I heard someone upstairs quietly clearing their throat.
“And DJ’s in there too, the tidy, anal, bullying personality, the obsession with cleanliness, the refusal to allow visitors into the house...”
“Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard.” I said confidently. I decided it was time to explore another path: “You mentioned Caitlin’s abortion earlier.”
“Dylan had great trouble with Under Milk Wood. The news about Florence and de Walden started the ideas flowing, but it only really fell into place after Caitlin’s abortion in 1951. Beynon the butcher was really Beynon the abortionist, that was the name of the doctor who did it. And that’s how Caitlin described it, like being in a butcher’s shop. The foetus was six-months, a perfectly formed baby. The doctor had to cut it up to get it out, pulling the baby out in chunks, Mr Beynon’s chops, bits of leg and arm everywhere. The awful thing was Caitlin only had it done so that she could go with Dylan to America.”
“It’s a bit shocking, killing a six-month foetus like that.”
“At least Milk Wood was born of it even if the baby wasn’t.”
There were footsteps on the stairs. This time, Rosalind heard them. “Don’t worry, it’s only Waldo. He’s been rather poorly, since I told him about Rachel doing Dylan’s letters.”
I imagined him quiet on the stairs, crouching low to catch the conversation, like a small child listening to the grown-ups talking late at night. The latch of the stairwell door clicked open. Rosalind looked across and said: “Come in Waldo, it’s only Mr Pritchard.”
I looked apprehensively across the room. Waldo was standing at the foot of the stairs, hunched up inside a voluminous dark blue night-shirt. He seemed to have shrivelled, and shrunk so small that he wasn’t the man I had seen at Fern Hill. I remembered his dark, wavy hair that night when I had watched him at his desk, but now it was greasy and matted, and stuck out like spikes from his head. His white face was puffed up in blotches, and his nose was covered in spots of blood as if he’d been scratching it in his sleep. His left eye was bloodshot and the skin below badly bruised. He looked distraught, and stared helplessly at his elderly mother who at that moment seemed twenty years younger than him. She radiated energy whilst he looked empty and pathetic.
Rosalind beckoned him to cross the room. “Come and meet Mr Pritchard, Waldo.”
I forced a smile that said hello. Waldo stared at me, his bloodshot eye watering down his cheek.
I got up from my chair and took a few steps towards him, stretching out my hand. “I’m pleased to....”
“Must the hawk in the egg kill the wren?” he asked.
“Sorry?”
“Will the fox in the womb kill more chickens?”
There seemed no point in staying. I drove home and parked the car outside the house. I felt in my jacket pocket for the key to the front door, but my fingers found only Rosalind’s sticky sausage. I withdrew it carefully from my pocket and threw it on the ground, and next door’s cat came rushing through the hedge and carried it away.
Fast Forward 2
Rebel against the flesh and bone,
The word of the blood, the wily skin,
And the maggot no man can slay.
“This ear that you’re worried about,” said the Inspector, pushing the last corner of an egg sandwich into his mouth.
“It’s gone to forensic, sir.”
“Who actually found it?”
“Mrs Watkins Kingdom Hall,” replied the Sergeant, politely turning away as the Inspector scraped bits of bread from between his teeth with the sharp end of a paper clip.
“And where exactly did she come across it?”
“In the pull-in by the Scadan C
och.”
“And whose ear is it?”
“A man’s ear, sir. Right side.”
“Any distinguishing features?”
“Someone’s taken a large bite out of it.”
“And how was it detached from its owner?”
“Sharp blade, sir, like a razor.”
“Anything else?”
“This was pinned to it,” replied the Sergeant, passing across a stained post-it note wrapped in a polythene bag.
“Before death takes you, O take back this,” read the Inspector. “Mean anything to you?”
“Afraid not, sir.”
“Perhaps we should call in the Poet Laureate, then. To get the case going, to set things in motion,” suggested the Inspector, knowing it was wasted. “Doesn’t your auntie have any views on the matter?” he asked, trying to soften the bite in his voice.
“She always said that God has the hymns, and the Devil has the poetry.”
“From the maniac’s tongue pours deathfilled singing.”
“You’ve lost me there, sir.”
“Browning, the wife,” responded the Inspector, sighing loudly. “We have a murderer who knows his poems.”
“And is a bit of a butcher.”
“To whom does the ear in question belong?”
“Can’t say, sir. We’ve checked the hospitals and doctors. Nothing missing from the mortuary, either.”
“No pub brawls or dirty work in the scrum?”
“Not that we’ve been able to ascertain.”
“And no-one’s come in and reported their ear’s gone missing?”
“No, sir.”
“Or that of a close relative?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, Sergeant, you’d better start looking for a body, then.”
“Murder, sir?”
“Foul play of some kind.”
That of Satan
Rachel woke up late and grumpy. I made some tea, let out the poultry and got back into bed. When I started talking about Waldo, yet again, she sharply reminded me I had a fledgling business to attend to. I left her reading Lives of Great Quakers and headed into Lampeter. The office was much as I’d left it, though the cleaner had piled the junk mail onto my chair, and pinned the Diana Dors photograph above the desk. There were three messages on the answer machine. The moral philosophy tutor wanted to know what progress I’d made in finding Dylan’s shed. A young woman from Cardiff asked me to search for her husband whom she’d lost on the coastal footpath several years ago. An Action Group in a nearby village wondered if I would discreetly investigate a local farmer. I rang the secretary. She told me they were worried that he was running trials on genetically modified rape. They wanted to know who his financial backers were. They couldn’t pay me but promised a turkey for Christmas.
As I put the phone down, Waldo walked through the door. He looked much better, but I could see he was angry. I offered him a seat. He pushed it away, and leaned across my desk. “What the hell you up to?”
I moved my chair back to escape the foul smell on his breath. “I’m trying to find Dylan’s shed,” I replied, wondering what he’d been eating.
“Bugger the shed.”
“It belongs to you.”
“So do his letters.”
“Your mother wants them published.”
“I can do that myself.”
“The decision’s been made.”
“Over my dead body.”
“You don’t understand...”
“But I do. Your wife wants a bit of fame at my expense.”
“It’s a labour of love. She’s not being paid.”
Waldo looked at me intently. He reached in his coat pocket, took out a little pearl-handled knife and started digging the dirt from behind his nails. “Love’s labours are sometimes better lost,” he eventually said. “Too many tears, too much bloo...”
“It’s too late,” I interrupted. “They’re in the National Library. Rachel’s working from copies.”
“You had no right.”
“They belong to the nation now.”
“You’ve robbed me of my past.”
“It could give you a future.”
“It’s not what I want at my age,” he shouted angrily, banging his fist on the desk.
“I think it’s time you went.”
“I think,” he replied, as he moved towards the door, “it’s time you started taking me seriously.”
He left, slamming the door hard behind him. I sharpened a few pencils and called my brother at New Scotland Yard, and asked him if there was anything on the files for Rosalind and Waldo. He coughed and spluttered, and muttered about losing his job but eventually promised to do what he could. In fact, he rang me back almost immediately. A good deal on Waldo, he said, from an early age: truancy, stealing, fighting, driving and taking away, grievous bodily harm, and damaging property in the National Library of Wales. Rosalind’s ‘form’ was altogether more interesting. She’d been arrested with Ian Fleming in a high security zone outside a sensitive military establishment. They’d been enjoying themselves on the back seat of Fleming’s Lanchester. Fleming had punched the security guards but strings were pulled and no charges were brought, though both were closely questioned by Military Intelligence.
“When did this happen?” I asked.
“Summer, 1950.”
“Anything else?”
“There are a couple of Special Branch cross-refs. Visits abroad, I think, but I daren’t check.”
“Any advice?”
“Stay well clear.”
I rang the National Library. Oh, yes, they certainly remembered Waldo Hilton.
“A voracious reader?” I asked.
“Not quite. He came in about two years ago, asked for a day ticket, and ordered all of T.S. Eliot’s books. The Reading Room was almost empty, it was August, and the staff weren’t watching the security monitors. It was our fault, really. Anyway, he took out this package, put it on the table and started slicing it up with a scalpel. To be fair, someone on the desk did eventually see it and she was just about to go and tell him that food wasn’t allowed in the Reading Room, when the phone rang and she forgot all about it. Except it wasn’t food. It was a giant turd, which he was slicing up and putting between the pages of Eliot’s books. It’s all on the video tape, if you want to see it. We use it for induction training all the time.”
I decided it was time for a drink and drove back to the Scadan Coch. The pub was quiet, unusually for the time of year. Billy Logs was sitting on the bench next to the bar, cleaning his chainsaw whilst he waited for his food. Miss Price Rose Cottage was sitting opposite, feeding peanuts to her dog and occasionally throwing some across to Llewela, though I doubted that this was a proper snack for a miniature llama. Next to Miss Price sat Dai Dark Horse, who ran the fishing and barber shop in the village. This had always struck me as a curious combination and it wasn’t always clear what customers were waiting for. Someone asking for a Number Two could just as well be referring to a type of hook as to a cropped haircut. When Dai asks “Anything for the weekend?” the answer is as likely to be a can of worms as a pack of condoms. It’s certainly disconcerting to be sitting in the barber’s chair when a customer asks for maggots. Dai puts down the scissors and goes into the back room where the tubs of maggots are stored. I know he wears rubber gloves and washes his hands but it’s still a very uncomfortable feeling when he comes back to work on your hair.
O’Malley was sitting on a high stool behind the bar, embroidering a sampler depicting the celebration in the pub on the night we voted for a Welsh Assembly. O’Malley’s embroidery brought as many customers to the pub as his food, and most came just to marvel that a man with only two fingers on his left hand could embroider so beautifully. The pub walls were decorated with his samplers, as were the covers for the tables, each of which contained verses from his favourite poets. They were covered with heavy plate glass, and they gave the pub something of the atmosphere of a Dutch café.
>
O’Malley was too engrossed in his needlework to care much about his customers, so I went behind the bar, took a bottle of Brains and helped myself to some toad-in-the-hole made with sliced pigeon breasts. O’Malley grunted and pointed with his chin towards the end of the counter, indicating that the toad would not be complete without some beetroot jelly and a spoonful of pickled nasturtium seeds. He was right.
The discussion in the bar was animated. One of the area’s striking characteristics is the large number of holly trees in the woods. The principal reason for this is that Billy Logs, like his father before him, refuses to cut down holly trees because to do so would bring a lifetime of bad luck and pestilential curses. Dai was teasing him about this but was making a serious point about the unbalanced nature of the local woodland. I tucked into my toad and listened to the talk, which is perhaps why I was the first person to hear the car.
Then O’Malley looked up, clearly not pleased with the prospect of further customers at this moment. We heard four doors slamming in quick succession, and the ostentatious click of central locking, followed by the beep of the alarm being activated. Just as the door opened we heard a small child say: “But why can’t we go to Macdonalds?” Llewela instantly stood to attention. We waited nervously, because the level of English decibel at which she was likely to spit was never predictable.
The family that came into the bar were largely what I had expected. Mr and Mrs Volvo and their two children stood for a moment on the threshold. We stopped talking immediately because that is the respectful custom, is it not, when strangers enter a pub deep in the Welsh countryside. It’s the polite thing to do, but people often misunderstand. Miss Price smiled, and the conversation started again.
The Dylan Thomas Murders Page 7